The Wikimedia Foundation has a number of mailing lists which are open to anyone who subscribes. Please see the list descriptions for posting information. Most lists disallow any posts by nonmembers, but allow anyone to subscribe and read the archives.

General information

Mailing lists are available in a number of formats: via a web archive, by email, or by NNTP using the mail-to-news gateway Gmane. Offsite archives of Wikipedia's mailing lists can be found at Gmane, MARC, and MarkMail.

Archives

Almost all mailing lists archive their posts and you can view these archives online by clicking the link on the main list information page. As in all forums on the internet, you're warmly encouraged to search and scan the archives for past discussions, before asking a question or making a proposal. Not doing so reduces the signal : noise ratio, hence it is considered uncivil and disruptive.

Using digests

Especially if you're not used to mailing lists (or bigger amount of emails in general) or you care less about some particular mailing list, it's useful to read messages in digests, which means you'll receive a single message containing e.g. all the messages of the day. You can set this in your mailing list options.

With digests it's way harder to actively participate in discussion (in particular the most heated ones): it's mostly for "read only" mode, voluntary or self-imposed. The next step is to disable distribution to your address and read only the archives when you have time (or even don't be subscribed). For your occasional replies, here are some tips to follow the mailing list etiquette and be sure your message will be put in the correct places and recognized by other list members:

absolutely avoid top posting, which is most horrible when replying to long digests: include only the message you're replying to, if any;

don't reply to the digest or create a new message to the list: instead, go to the web archives (for instance mailarchive:wikimedia-l), find the thread you're replying to, select a message (no need to waste time finding the exact one), and click the link after the name of the author at the top.

This will automatically retrieve all visible and hidden headers (mailing list address and others, subject, reply-to) needed for your reply to be correctly recognized by human readers, threads and all sorts of software.

Specific lists

There is also an automatically generated list of public mailing lists, arranged alphabetically, at lists.wikimedia.org.

Wikimedia mailing list

wikimedia-l, formerly foundation-l, is the central mailing list for all Wikimedia-wide matters, whether they concern the projects, the Wikimedia Foundation, or the chapters. If you care about fundraising, starting new projects or debating global policy issues, this is the list for you. Posting in languages other than English is welcome, although English is a language most of the audience can understand. Multilingual posts (where the poster repeats the same text in another language) are also welcome.

Messages may be posted only by subscribers. Archives are publicly available.

Wikimedia Announcements mailing list

The Foundation also operates an Announcements only list WikimediaAnnounce-l. This list is meant to provide a simple, opt-in list where people can be rapidly notified of Foundation and Chapter announcements, news and upcoming events. The list is moderated and all replies go directly to wikimedia-l.

If you feel a list you are on does not currently have enough active admins to keep up with the workload, please first contact the existing administrators at <listname>-owner@lists.wikimedia.org. If they are inactive and don't respond, create a Phabricator task with your request and put it in the "Wikimedia-Mailing-lists" project (quick link).

Advanced questions and tips

Splitting up the Daily Digests

Linux users can split up the daily digest:

Put the following 3 lines into your .procmailrc and activate procmail support.

:0:
* ^Subject:.*mailinglist.*Digest
| formail +1 -ds >>mailinglist

Removing emails from archives

Emails should be sent to mailing lists with care, as removal of emails from archives with any degree of safety is nearly impossible.

Running bin/arch, as is commonly suggested, has the effect of renumbering all the messages, breaking all links to the archive. It's also buggy and has corrupted the list archives in the past. Because of this, our developers have made a policy of not performing any archive deletions. Instead, they will wipe the contents of the message but keep the message to keep the archives intact. However, this can still be problematic so please make sure you have a good reason for requesting an archive removal, bearing in mind that the email will still be in the Inbox of all the existing subscribers and in the archives not managed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Translating Mailman

If your language is not yet supported by Mailman, you can help by providing a translation for it. Instructions and an explanation on how to translate Mailman can be found at wiki.list.org.